Our Tribalism Will Be the Death of Us . while a virus isn’t partisan, many Americans’ responses to this one have been emphatically so. ......... One of this tribalism’s obvious drivers is many Americans’ substitution of investment and involvement in physical communities with investment and involvement in online ones that more efficiently sort them into cliques of the rigidly like-minded.
Russia’s Military, Once Creaky, Is Modern and Lethal A significantly upgraded military has emerged as a key tool of Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy, as he flexes his might around the globe and, most ominously, on the Ukraine border. ......... It is Mr. Putin’s highest-stakes use of the military to muscle Russia back into the global relevance it lost with the ending of the Cold War. Mr. Putin laid out that doctrine in 2018, when he used his annual state-of-the-nation speech to unveil new nuclear weapons that could fly 20 times the speed of sound. ......... The T-72B3 tanks amassed on Ukraine’s border have a new thermal optics system for nighttime fighting as well as guided missiles with twice the range of other tanks ........ Kalibr cruise missiles deployed on ships and submarines in the Black Sea and Iskander-M rockets arrayed along the border can hit targets just about anywhere inside Ukraine ......... The military relies less on a dwindling number of conscripts and more on a slimmed-down, well-trained core of roughly 400,000 contract soldiers. .........
“cross-domain coercion” — blending the real or threatened use of force with diplomacy, cyberattacks and propaganda to achieve political aims.
........ For all its strides in recent years, Russia’s military retains a critical weakness of its Soviet predecessor: the civilian side of the country’s economy, nearly devoid of high-tech manufacturing and corporate investment in research and development. Army expenditures amount to a far higher percentage of the gross domestic product than in most European countries, starving other sectors.
Russia Isn’t a Dead Petrostate, and Putin Isn’t Going Anywhere . The European Union typically relies on Russia for about 40 percent of its natural gas, making it by far the continent’s largest supplier. With an estimated 127,000 Russian troops on the border with Ukraine, Europe seems torn between responding to what would be an egregious upset of its security and safeguarding its own energy requirements. ........... Saudi Aramco, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and Russia’s Rosneft are all investing large sums to increase future oil production. ...... If the world reaches its climate goals of net-zero emissions by 2050, the International Energy Agency and others predict it will still be using roughly one-quarter as much oil and one-half as much natural gas as it does today. ....... From France’s “yellow vest” protests to Kazakhstan’s recent unrest over fuel price hikes, it is increasingly clear that if climate ambition comes into tension with energy reliability or affordability or the security of energy supplies, climate ambition will lose.
How Crypto Became the New Subprime . If the stock market isn’t the economy — which it isn’t — then cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin really, really aren’t the economy. Still, crypto has become a pretty big asset class (and yielded huge capital gains to many buyers); by last fall the combined market value of cryptocurrencies had reached almost $3 trillion. ............... So crypto has become a large asset class even though nobody can clearly explain what legitimate purpose it’s for. ............ 44 percent of crypto investors are nonwhite, and 55 percent don’t have a college degree. This matches up with anecdotal evidence that crypto investing has become remarkably popular among minority groups and the working class. .......... “Why are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers?” He then declared, “The question answers itself.” Homeownership dropped sharply once the bubble burst. ......... regulators have made the same mistake they made on subprime: They failed to protect the public against financial products nobody understood, and many vulnerable families may end up paying the price.
It’s Hard to Tell When the Crypto Bubble Will Burst, or If There Is One Crypto prices are highly volatile, as this week’s sell-off showed. But die-hard enthusiasts believe prices will keep soaring in a world where traditional notions of value don’t apply.......... Traditional financial analysis doesn’t apply here. A stock analyst, for instance, determines whether a company’s shares are expensive or cheap by assessing its business model, future prospects and leadership. But few, if any, of those metrics translate to cryptocurrency valuation. Belief alone can drive value. ........
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